Modest yet highly ambitious: How does Ugur Sahin do it?
Maintaining a humble outlook towards life and keeping curiosity alive is the truth behind the life of the 2019 Mustafa(Pbuh) Prize laureate who has developed a vaccine that “could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era.”
MSTF Media reports:
Ugur Sahin rides his mountain bike to work, and follows a rigorous schedule as the commander of a company that is on a “war footing”. A scientist who reluctantly moved into management, Sahin is a calm, measured person and being at the forefront of fighting a global crisis has done little to alter his thoughtful, deliberate style.
The Financial Times describes Sahin as “a scientific journal-obsessed academic” who spends his holidays reading. In fact, it was his being an avid reader that helped BioNTech respond with speed to the Coronavirus outbreak. After Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet, he was convinced that the Coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. He immediately dedicated more than 400 staff to COVID-19 research, all of whom canceled vacations and set to work on what they called “Project Lightspeed”.
Sahin, as a participant of the 7th Science and Technology Exchange Program (STEP) held by the Mustafa
Science and Technology Foundation (MSTF) in May 2020, anticipated that “we are facing a pandemic the only solution to which is a vaccine. This pandemic will challenge us for the next two years.”
Despite their company being valued at nearly $30 billion, The Mustafa
Prize laureate and his wife, Türeci, are known for their modest lifestyle. They still live with their teenage daughter in a modest apartment near their office. They ride bicycles to work. They do not own a car.
“Our need for money is just the need to have a normal life,” Sahin says.
When they first learned about the efficacy data of BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, Sahin and his family marked the moment by brewing Turkish tea at home. “We celebrated, of course,” he said. “It was a relief.”
Their desire to find a vaccine, Türeci explains, did not grow out of any competitive, financial or scientific impetus, but because they felt a “moral” imperative to help the world. In his Mustafa
Prize acceptance speech, Sahin described the mission of scientists as “bringing the knowledge and technology of the whole planet for the sake of saving a single individual patient”—an idea which he said is in agreement with the belief of Muslims and other religions in that ‘saving one life is like saving the whole humanity.’
Sahin also states that “what drives us is the knowledge that there are kids who want to have a normal life, there’s the mother, the teacher, the old person being isolated, there is so much need.”
“I am driven by curiosity, I am always asking questions, I want to understand how things work,” he adds. “I work in a cancer hospital and I had to tell many patients that we can’t help them anymore. As a scientist I knew that we are not doing everything that is possible so we need to do more. That’s what drives me on.”
Sahin avoids checking the company’s share price, or responding to speculative statements emanating from the White House and Brussels that an mRNA vaccine could be ready by the autumn. Instead, he spends what spare time he has preparing data for regulators, and investors, who will become crucial once production becomes a possibility. He is the only board member to have an office in the building where the laboratory work is carried out and generally prioritizes mentoring PhD students and overseeing experiments over wooing investors.
“He never changed from being incredibly humble and personable,” said Matthias Kromayer, one of the investors of BioNTech.
But he is not modest when it comes to science. As oncology professor and his long-time colleague, Matthias Theobald, says “He [Sahin] is a very humble man. But he wants to create structures that will allow him to realize his vision. From this point of view, his ambitions are far from modest.”
His commitment to science is evident from the fact that after Sahin and Türeci married in 2002, they immediately returned to the lab to work. Even when they occasionally go on holiday to the Canary Islands, they choose an apartment with an Internet connection so that they can dedicate half of their time to working.
“Ugur is a very, very unique individual,” Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, says. “He cares only about science. Discussing business is not his cup of tea. He doesn’t like it at all. He’s a scientist and a man of principles.”
Power couple balance life and work
Ozlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin are rapidly becoming the most celebrated marriage in science since Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radioactivity. According to the Times, they may yet share a Nobel Prize after their company, BioNTech—along with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer—announced their COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90 percent effective.
Early in his career, Sahin met Türeci at Saarland University in Hamburg. They have been collaborating ever since, though their obsession until this year was cancer medicine, and how to manipulate the immune system to eradicate tumors. Elaborating on his method for fighting cancer during his Mustafa
Prize acceptance speech, Sahin stated that “immunotherapy is a newly emerging field and many scientists believe that it will become the future of cancer medicine.” Indeed, this multidisciplinary field of research acknowledged by the Mustafa
Prize, has proven to be not only the future of cancer medicine but having turned the tide in COVID-19 pandemic and the viruses to come.
In 2001, Sahin and Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies. After several years they founded BioNTech as well, looking to use a wider range of technologies, including messenger RNA (mRNA), to treat cancer. Having applied this method to COVID-19 vaccine development, Sahin in the 7th STEP discussed the merits of mRNA vaccines, stating that “they can be designed and manufactured fast within weeks; they have intrinsic immune-stimulatory properties and do not require addition of adjuvants; they are highly immunogenic and induce neutralizing antibodies as well as T-cell responses. They are also well-characterized biopharmaceuticals with a high purity and are free of animal material.”
The couple clearly love working together. “Each has their complementary skills and we try to synergize,” Türeci says.
Sahin similarly states that “It really is a privilege to work together. You don’t need to explain every day why you are doing things. Her office is just one door down so if I have a good idea, I go next door and we discuss it and we don’t have always the same opinion.”
The search for the vaccine has, he admits, taken over their lives. “We talk at every opportunity,” he says, but they don’t resent the blurring of the boundaries between work and home. “At the end of the day it is also our passion. We are not important, it’s the task we are doing. We need to try everything and if it’s not sufficient then we have to accept that.”
